by Alex Thompson

Disclosure: The author is a legal professional who works on First Amendment and public records matters in Utah and has worked with the respondents in the petition described here. This article is published with their permission.

The Utah Office of the Lieutenant Governor has lost its bid to have four citizens declared vexatious requesters and cut off from asking about the 2024 election.

In a Decision and Order entered August 5, 2026, Government Records Office Director Lonny J. Pehrson denied the office's amended petition against Jon Michael Clara, Goud Maragani, Natalie Clawson, and Phil Lyman. He decided it without a hearing, finding the dispositive questions were pure statutory interpretation and that scheduling one "would create unnecessary burdens for both the state agency and the private citizens."

The petition had asked the state to treat the four as a single vexatious "person."

The theory

Utah's records statute defines a "person" to include "any combination acting in concert with one another." The Lieutenant Governor's Office argued that definition should carry into Section 63G-2-209, the vexatious requester provision, so that the four respondents' combined 55 requests about 2024 candidate nomination petitions could be treated as one concerted campaign. The office characterized that campaign as designed to "gum up" government operations.

Pehrson rejected it on the plain language. Section 209 "repeatedly and consistently uses singular terminology," he wrote, referring to "a vexatious requester," "the respondent," "the respondent's statement," and "a person." The structure "is designed to protect due process by requiring an individualized, fact-specific showing of conduct against each distinct respondent."

The sponsor's own words

Then the decision turns to who wrote the law.

Section 209 was enacted by Senate Bill 231 in 2023, sponsored by Senator Curt Bramble. Pehrson quotes Bramble's committee and floor statements describing what the provision was for: situations where "one citizen, through weaponizing GRAMA, is able to dominate . . . the entire agency," and "an individual who will use GRAMA incessantly . . . without taking any purpose for the GRAMA request other than to simply submit literally hundreds of GRAMA requests."

"The legislative record," the Director wrote, "contains no indication that the statute was meant to permit government agencies to aggregate the requests of multiple separate citizens to declare them collectively vexatious."

"Absurd and dangerous results"

The sharpest passage concerns what the office offered as proof of concerted action.

Among its evidence, the Lieutenant Governor's Office cited Maragani's appearance as co-counsel for Clawson. Pehrson wrote that extending Section 209 to reach a professional attorney-client relationship "would allow agencies to penalize attorneys for representing clients, which would severely impinge upon the right to counsel." Lumping citizens together because they testified at the same public hearing or referenced each other's public social media posts, he added, "would discourage civic participation and due process."

His conclusion: "The Legislature did not intend to craft a statute that could be weaponized by state offices to penalize legal representation, public testimony, or the use of publicly shared research."

That is the state's own records director describing what the Lieutenant Governor's Office attempted.

Even taken together, it wasn't close

Pehrson went on to hold that the petition would fail on the merits regardless.

The 55 requests spanned two years and broke down as Clara 30, Lyman 16, Maragani 5, and Clawson 4. Maragani's and Clawson's totals were "exceptionally low." Declaring citizens vexatious on such numbers "would constitute an unauthorized and unprecedented restriction on the public's constitutional and statutory right of access."

For comparison, Utah County documented 435 requests from one person and received a six-month order. Logan City documented more than 500.

The respondents' own filings undercut the picture further. Clara noted his last election-related request was submitted in May 2025. Clawson said she had filed three relevant election requests, the most recent more than eight months earlier.

The requests worked

The last finding is the one the respondents will care about most.

Section 209 requires the Director to weigh the "scope, nature, content, language, and subject matter" of the requests. Pehrson found these had "an articulated public purpose," and that their legitimacy was "evidenced by the fact that they prompted multiple independent audits and eventual statutory reforms by the Legislature."

They "cannot be characterized as having 'no obvious purpose' other than to 'gum up' government operations, nor can they be deemed an abuse of the right of access."

The state's records director has now found as fact that the requests the Lieutenant Governor's Office tried to stop are what produced Utah's signature-verification audits and the legislative fix that followed.

What happens next

The office has 30 days to petition for judicial review in district court under Section 63G-2-404. Review is de novo.

If it doesn't, one question remains open. Section 209 permits a court to award attorney fees to a respondent where an agency's petition lacks a reasonable basis in fact or law, and governmental immunity is waived for that claim. In the three years the provision has existed, no published decision reflects such an award.

A decision finding that a petition would have been "unauthorized and unprecedented," and that its theory risked penalizing attorneys for representing clients, is a reasonable place for someone to test it.